Thursday, November 19, 7:30 p.m. 

Face to Face: Children of the AIDS Crisis in Africa  BUY NOW

This unique book by Karen Ande and Ruthann Richter combines vivid narrative and photography to document the impact of AIDS on Africa’s children, offering a moving portrayal of life in the shadow of the disease. It captures the hopes and heartaches of youngsters who have lost parents to the disease or are coping with HIV infection themselves. The book profiles some of the activists – the energetic and inspiring people working at the grassroots level to help restore the well-being of these youngsters. And it pays homage to the care-giving grannies, the vast network of older women who have stepped in to keep families together as traditional social networks collapse.

“Ruthann Richter and Karen Ande have given a new voice and face to this pandemic, which continues to destroy the hopes, dreams and lives of children. Through compelling and poignantly informed stories and narratives and incredibly sensitive and touching portraits of children, families, providers and communities, Richter and Ande remind us, in a deeply personal way, how important HIV remains in Africa and beyond.” — Philip Pizzo, MD, dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine and a specialist in pediatric HIV

Karen Ande has been chronicling the AIDS epidemic and its effects on children in sub-Saharan Africa since 2002. Her work has taken her from rural villages to city slums in Kenya and Rwanda, where she photographs people who daily face the challenges of AIDS and its impact on those they know and love. She works with the very poor, with people who rarely benefit from large-scale government intervention, but are helped enormously by organizations like Firelight Foundation and G.R.A.C.E. USA that support the work of grassroots community activists.